How Russia’s brutal tactics in Ukraine were foreshadowed in Syria

When Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February, there was a sense of shock in Western capitals – first at the brazenness of the operation itself, and soon after, at its brutality. It didn’t take long for Russian forces to begin bombarding civilian areas in an attempt to capture territory in the east and northeast of the country. In the first month, the United Nations human rights commission recorded 3,455 civilian deaths in the country, most of which were caused by shelling, heavy artillery, missiles and airstrikes.

Vladimir Putin went from a partner on the world stage to a pariah in the eyes of European governments. Global opinion of Russia was transformed overnight. But for many Syrians, there was a grim familiarity to the events unfolding in Ukraine. They had seen this kind of brutality before, in their own country.

“What shocked me is that the world is shocked. Why are they shocked? Is it just because it’s a European country?” said Abdulkafi Alhamdo, an English teacher from the Syrian city of Aleppo. “Syria was a laboratory for their weapons, for their tactics. Now they are using them in Ukraine,” he told The Independent.

Over the past two months, many Syrians have spoken out about the similarities between Russia’s tactics in Ukraine and its 2015 intervention in Syria. They have wondered aloud how the world failed to recognise the lengths to which Putin’s Russia would go to in order to project its power.

Russia intervened in Syria’s civil war in support of the country’s president, Bashar al-Assad. It broke a virtual stalemate in favour of the dictator through the use of devastating airpower across the country.

Airwars, an investigative organisation that tracks civilian casualties, estimated that as many as 6,398 civilians were killed by Russian actions in the six years it has been active in Syria. Alhamdo witnessed first-hand the brutality of a Russian military assault when he and his family were on the receiving end of a Russian-Syrian siege of his home city of Aleppo.

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During the final battle for the northern Syrian city in 2016, a Russian and Syrian bombing campaign killed more than 440 civilians in just one month, according to the Violations Documentation Centre, a Syrian civil monitoring group. Human Rights Watch said the airstrikes “often appeared to be recklessly indiscriminate, deliberately targeted at least one medical facility, and included the use of indiscriminate weapons such as cluster munitions and incendiary weapons”.

Alhamdo said watching Russia’s assault on Ukraine was “like rewatching a movie”. He said living in the sights of the Russian military meant living in “constant fear”.

“It’s constant, thinking of death, thinking of displacement, being worried about your family. In fact, living under Russian bombardment means the safer you think a place should be, the more dangerous it is,” he said.

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It’s not just the brutality of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine that has drawn comparisons to Syria, but specific tactics it deployed. Mass destruction of civilian areas, the targeting of medical facilities and personnel, siege tactics and attacking humanitarian corridors were all tactics tried first in Syria.

US officials said that Russia had appointed General Aleksandr Dvornikov to lead Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Dvornikov was in charge of Russia’s intervention in Syria for most of the first year, between September 2015 and July 2016.

Majd Khalaf, a former volunteer for the Syrian Civil Defence, a first responder organisation also known as the White Helmets, said he has seen several indications that Moscow was following the same playbook. When he was scrolling Twitter the other day he saw a video of a paramedic treating a victim of an apparent air strike when another attack occurred at the same location. In Syria, those so-called “double-tap” attacks became a hallmark of the Russian air force.

“I saw a video of a double-attack in Ukraine and it reminded me of what happened to us in Syria. I tweeted about it to transfer knowledge to the people in Ukraine – first responders, journalists – so they could protect themselves.

“They target the location, then they wait until the first responders come to help civilians, then the aircraft comes to the same location and targets it,” Khalaf said.

The White Helmets were often on the receiving end of those attacks. “The White Helmets lost more than 292 from our volunteers,” he said. The use of double-tap attacks by the Russian and Syrian military has been well documented throughout the Syrian war. In 2020, United Nations investigators said Russian forces carried out a double tap attack on a market on 22 July, 2019, killing 43 civilians. After the first strike, first responders arrived at the scene to attend to the casualties. That is when a second strike hit.

The United Nations Commission of Inquiry on Syria said in its report that “the Russian Air Force did not direct the attacks at a specific military objective, amounting to the war crime of launching indiscriminate attacks in civilian areas”.

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“It took a lot of time for us to understand this tactic,” Khalaf added. He said the impact for civilians of Russia entering the war was huge. “Since Russia invaded Syria everything has changed. Like Mariupol, people only have two options: maybe they die in that city or they are forcibly displaced. What they are doing now in Mariupol, they did in Aleppo. It’s the same strategy.”

Dr Zaher Sahloul, a Syrian-American physician and president of Med Global, is among the few people who has seen the impact of Russian bombs in both Syria and Ukraine. He made many trips to Syria throughout the war to train local doctors and help set up medical facilities. Today, he is doing the same in Ukraine.

Part of that training, he told The Independent, was demonstrating to more than 200 Ukrainian physicians how to treat patients who have suffered from an attack by chemical weapons – something that has not happened yet in Ukraine, but happened hundreds of times in Syria. “We did training in mass casualties and trauma patients, and in chemical weapons. It’s the same training that we have used in Syria for many physicians,” he said.

In Syria, Dr Sahloul visited medical facilities that were built inside caves to avoid Russian and Syrian government airstrikes following relentless attacks. Physicians for Human Rights, an NGO that documents attacks on healthcare facilities, tracked at least 244 such attacks in Syria by either Russian and Syrian government forces. In 2019, a New York Times investigation revealed that Russian jets bombed four hospitals in just 12 hours in May of that year.

Earlier this month, the World Health Organisation said more than 70 people have been killed and 53 injured in Russian attacks on Ukrainian medical facilities since the invasion began. The organisation said it had confirmed at least 147 attacks on healthcare facilities, including an attack on a children’s hospital in Mariupol.

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“This is very similar to what happened in Syria: the bombing of hospitals, targeting healthcare providers, and targeting civilian infrastructure,” Dr Sahloul said. “And I think the purpose of that, from our experience, is to force a large displacement of civilians that will make it easier for the ground troops to control an area,” he added.

Dr Sahloul points to the siege of Mariupol, in southern Ukraine, as an example of this strategy in action. Russian forces have besieged the city for some weeks now, only recently allowing civilians to leave, and not without them coming under fire. The city’s mayor said 10,000 civilians have been killed in the bombardment.

“Sieges can cause a lot of mental health problems, shortage of food, a shortage of nutrition, patients with non-communicable diseases or chronic disease are unable to bring to buy their medications, pregnant women are not able to have natural deliveries, patients who may need simple surgery end up having complications or die because there’s no access to hospitals or specialists,” he said.

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“We’re seeing the same thing in Mariupol. This is, of course, a crime against humanity, when you basically punish the whole population in order to control it. But at the same time, these are very effective tactics of war that have been used in Syria.”

There is one notable difference between Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and its actions in Syria, however. Whereas Putin’s invasion of its European neighbour prompted widespread condemnation, sanctions and vast military support for Ukrainian defenders, there was no such mobilisation when Syrian civilians were under fire.

In fact, Dr Sahloul draws a direct line from that inaction to Russia’s brazen invasion of Ukraine. “I think if there was some accountability for the war crimes that were done in Syria by the Assad regime, Iran and Russia, we would not have seen that in Ukraine. We warned the international community that if you don’t do anything to stop what’s happening in Syria, it will come back to haunt us,” he added.

“People like us who went to Syria multiple times saw the impact of barrel bombs on children and the levelling of whole neighbourhoods and cities by fighter jets, the bombing of hospitals, using chemical weapons. And in spite of that, the reaction of the international community in Syria was mute. People did not pay attention,” he said.

Khalaf, meanwhile, continues to follow news from Ukraine and has on occasion tweeted out advice to Ukrainians and first responders. He said that his experience in Syria causes him concern for Ukraine’s future. “When I’m following the news in Ukraine, I feel like I know where it’s going,” he said.